City on the Brink, the Year 2001

It was just a little big town, the kind subject to flowery description in letters home. A peddler with his fake watches waving hello, a commissioner whistling on his lunch hour with his sweetheart. I was from someplace else, and I went there to bury my face in a tire. There were remnants of the fragrance of blossoms the tire had traveled through – I saw straight into the future with its many white steps. But then dark clouds bullied out the sun, and the bricks began to shiver. The watch man packed up his parasol and the commissioner stood and stared at the sky. Still, I clung to my tire sniffing its many scents. I was taken to the heart of some greasy borough; I was elevated on a suspension bridge over the whitecaps of a channel. All the while I was composing my own letter home. I spoke only of a green jar at a fishmonger’s filled with fish eyes, how they looked on but never blinked. I thought that was all the people at home needed to know – there is an eye that sees in the middle of a disaster. Never mind anything else.